Storage player Basho open sources Riak CS

Basho has done pretty well positioning its Riak CS distributed storage technology in the open source cloud world. It’s not really part of either the OpenStack nor the CloudStack organizations but it will run in both environments. This was a tad unusual because, strictly speaking, Riak CS itself was not open source.

At least until now. As of Wednesday, Riak CS will be available under the Apache 2 license.

“We are not part of the OpenStack Foundation but we have deployed Riak CS in OpenStack environments with OpenStack components,” Sheehy said. OpenStack also includes its own storage subsystem as an option. The work with Cloudstack is a little more explicit since Cloudstack is mostly a compute cloud with networking elements but does not itself offer a real storage subsystem analogous to Amazon’s S3 storage, he said.

One of Riak CS’s key draws is that customers can use it to build private or public cloud storage that is API-compatible with Amazon S3, the 800-lb gorilla in public cloud storage.

Along with its licensing news, Basho also unveiled new features for the open source version including multipart uploads to ease the movement of very large files in pieces into the store; per-bucket policies to restrict access to some data based on its source IP; and Riak Control, a standalone web administration tool for managing users (see screenshot below.)

Basho continues to offer Riak CS Enterprise as a commercial product with around-the-clock support. To be clear, Basho’s Riak, the distributed database underlying Riak CS was already an open source product.